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A review by gadicohen93
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
5.0
Donald Ray Pollock, you and your Arvin Russel knocked me stiff. This is like a darker, funnier Coen Bros film. It's sick on so many levels. Sick with little black sores oozing out a thick, literary juice. I drank it all up.
I love Pollock's style: He writes characters by getting into their heads--even the psychopaths, revealing to us all their sick little thoughts as they diddle about their lives, trying to get by in hicksville, Ohio/West VA. He sets up situations that got me all riled up and built up tension that felt exploitative and profound at the same time. I loved how real all the characters seemed. They were so removed from my life, but I still sympathized with them, or at least understood them as human beings.
The Devil All the Time is just dripping with an overpowering cynicism. These characters live in a world where no one really cares about them, every man for himself – except God is there for them all. God is there for these people. Laughing my ass off. I laughed so many times. It’s kind of horrific, the kinds of things I laughed at, and that made this book such a revelation to me – it ridiculed death and poverty and ignorance so skillfully, but it still kept a strong moral backbone, if that makes sense. It was hilariously nihilistic, but also realistic to the point of horror.
I had tiny qualms. I didn’t like the Roy/Theodore storyline as much as the others. And looking back, the book’s title feels too trivial, unimposingly unrelated to the plot– though in a way, I feel like that’s exactly fitting for this book. The small, irrelevant details about these characters’ lives sneak up on you and keep you fabulously entertained all the way to the last part, when all the loose ends come crashing into each other, and you realize you’ve been chuckling with the Devil the entire time.
I love Pollock's style: He writes characters by getting into their heads--even the psychopaths, revealing to us all their sick little thoughts as they diddle about their lives, trying to get by in hicksville, Ohio/West VA. He sets up situations that got me all riled up and built up tension that felt exploitative and profound at the same time. I loved how real all the characters seemed. They were so removed from my life, but I still sympathized with them, or at least understood them as human beings.
The Devil All the Time is just dripping with an overpowering cynicism. These characters live in a world where no one really cares about them, every man for himself – except God is there for them all. God is there for these people. Laughing my ass off. I laughed so many times. It’s kind of horrific, the kinds of things I laughed at, and that made this book such a revelation to me – it ridiculed death and poverty and ignorance so skillfully, but it still kept a strong moral backbone, if that makes sense. It was hilariously nihilistic, but also realistic to the point of horror.
I had tiny qualms. I didn’t like the Roy/Theodore storyline as much as the others. And looking back, the book’s title feels too trivial, unimposingly unrelated to the plot– though in a way, I feel like that’s exactly fitting for this book. The small, irrelevant details about these characters’ lives sneak up on you and keep you fabulously entertained all the way to the last part, when all the loose ends come crashing into each other, and you realize you’ve been chuckling with the Devil the entire time.